From finding out the ages of celebrities to researching college essays, people have been using Wikipedia as their go-to, free source of information for decades. But now, with AI threatening the site's donation-based revenue model, Wikipedia is saying “enough is enough.”
At the Reuters NEXT Summit in New York, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales revealed that the online encyclopedia continues to negotiate with technology companies to monetize the use of Wikipedia content.
Companies like OpenAI rely heavily on Wikipedia content to input responses and train models, increasing the cost of online encyclopedias to maintain incoming traffic.
“The AI bots that are crawling on Wikipedia are crawling the whole site… so you have to have more servers, you have to have more RAM and memory to cache it, and the cost of doing that is disproportionately high,” Wales said during the summit.
Semlash said Wikipedia's operating costs for the 2023-2024 fiscal year were $179 million.
“Wikipedia is supported by volunteers. They are donating money to support Wikipedia, not to subsidize OpenAI, which costs us a lot of money. I don't think that's fair,” Wales said at the summit.
There are companies that will pay you
Although Wikipedia is primarily sustained by donations, new avenues of monetization have also opened up.
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